It's funny and awful watching how the sneaky Simon Cowell has tweaked himself this year, physically and conceptually. He's sliding through certain changes that are either part of a greater script or just part of his strategy to get through this season of The X Factor. There's no real sign of any authentic re-examination of his general position, just a subtle adjustment that accepts that last year's winner, whose name escapes most people, failed in his bid for the Christmas No 1 because he lacked the sort of swagger and glitter people still lust for in their pop. Cowell's a novelty boy, a tycoon of kitsch, a hater of imaginative independence, but as a genius at manipulating the consensus of average opinion, he knows what he has to do in order to maintain his control of the coarse and coarsening tabloid world. Times are tough and a feistier, flashier sort of pop star is required.

Cowell now considers it a good thing that members of his boy band actually style themselves rather than relying on helpers and he refers to a new generation of pop stars emerging who must be allowed to express themselves without grown-ups getting in the way. In his own shrewd, passionless way, he's professing an interest in the weird, in what the show calls the "current".

X Factor versions of pop freaks, strays, chameleons and self-styled "icons" have emerged to jostle with the conformist, middle-of-the-road song and dancers. Cowell has his seedy eye on the sort of winner who possesses their own brand of initiative, even a hint of plastic danger, and who might resist another assault on his position from a Rage Against the Machine-type enemy.

Let's dream, if only to combat Cowell's nightmare. If Cowell is really changing and developing a very provisional interest in the idea of music as something that isn't just about pleasure, profit, play, gossip and fame, and he is actually paying attention to why the greatest artists, the ones who live in the memory, have a genuinely surreal and even subversive quality, I wonder how long it might take him to reach, say, Talking Heads, David Sylvian, the Flaming Lips or Animal Collective. I was thinking 100 years to get to Miles Davis, Wyatt and Ravel, 1,000 to reach Ligeti and Kagel, 2,000 years to reach Webern and 3,500 years to reach the hyper-aware, energetically precise experimental German composer Helmut Lachenmann, one of the most original composers of the 20th century.

Anyone with any musical intelligence should not be put off by these 3,500 years. It should actually be encouraging that there is still music that takes time to find and time to love. Once you do love, you will always love. Lachenmann reminds us that often brutal, to some ugly, avant-garde boldness can be extremely glamorous and liberating.

Lachenmann attempted – in what he called musique concrète instrumentale – to represent the sound world explored in disembodied musique concrète through electronic means by using acoustic instruments and unconventional instrumental effects. His music recalls and reconsiders the past, but breaks free, so that filtered, fragmented shards of the musical past – Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Mahler, Strauss, Xenakis, Stockhausen – drift by at a surreal distance and each piece he writes strives to reinvent the very idea of music and locate unheard-of sounds. It's an entire history of music agonisingly burning itself out and blissfully coming back to life.

I first came across him on a 1997 ECM New Series CD, Dal Niente by clarinettist Eduard Brunner, which involves a sparse, spiralling series of solo clarinet pieces composed by the likes of Stockhausen, Stravinsky and Boulez, as well as by Lachenmann. It's logical that European specialist ECM would release the German composer – a jab in the eye for those who consider ECM albums bloodless and merely decorative. Another New Series recording, Schwankungen am Rand ("Teetering on the Brink"), is a good place to begin exploring his devastating soundworld, while a 75th birthday celebration at the Southbank Centre on 23 and 24 October is a must for lovers of revolutionary sound and unexpected beauty.

In his writings, Lachenmann has naturally scorned people's oppression at the hands of a cynical, superficial and unprecedentedly trivial mainstream. He reviles the anti-intellectual face of capitalism. "I have the possibility," he once said, "and the duty, to fight that anti-intellectuality and to contribute to the sensitisation, including the clarity of hearing, which stand in opposition to the cheaper forms of magic with which our cultural landscapes are polluted."

It might take 3,500 years to wipe the smirk off Cowell's face, but it will still be worth it.

The Tony Wilson Interviews – with Paul Morley, Durutti Column and others talking about Wilson – is at the Purcell Room, London SE1 on Wednesday, 7.45pm